Wednesday, 28 June 2017

What its like to live with hypochondria..

So its been a long tough few months and I feel like right now is the time I should share whats been happening in my life..

Around the beginning of the year I started to develop some scary symptoms, sharp stabbing brain pains, constant nausea, loss of feeling in my arms & legs (completely terrifying) & feeling like I was so run down I could barely function.. fast forward to many doctors visits later and a diagnosis of chronic sinusitis, I thought a simple dose of antibiotics would clear it up and i'd be on my merry way, how wrong I was!

Its been a long journey, with so many varying symptoms in the last five months that I have started to believe this simply couldn't be sinusitis, everyday seems like a battle as to how i'm going to feel that day & what the world could possibly throw at me, alongside this it has totally flared up my health anxiety and as a consequence has also flared my 'hypochondria' tendencies up along with it.

For those of you who are unsure what Hypochondria is, the definition is: abnormal chronic anxiety about ones health, to put it bluntly, it basically means my abnormally overactive brain constantly believes I have something seriously life threateningly wrong with me.

The reason why I wanted to discuss this on my blog today was because of the constant taboo that comes with hypochondria, i've had so many people laugh at me calling me a hypochondriac over the years & the fact its flared its ugly head once again, has made me want to step up and take control over peoples misconceptions of this, quite frankly, shit mental disease.

Anxiety is hard enough in itself, chronic anxiety is something else, imagine your entire days being filled with dread of what your mind might conjure up next, living day to day via Google frantically trying to find out what is wrong with you (this very thing could be how you ended up on this post) and believing you need to dial 111 at any given moment & imagine this being all completely made up by your overactive mind.

I want to give anyone out there reading this who may feel debilitated by this, hope, hope that there is a light at the end of a dark grey tunnel of cloudy judgement, hope that you will get through this bad patch of uncertainty, and finally hope that you will believe one day there is nothing wrong with you other than an over functioning mental state & that it will go away, I promise you will feel better with time!

I also want to dedicate this post to those out there who have mocked hypochondria before and accept that sometimes the mental capabilities of your own brain aren't those of others and to be patient, kind and supportive, a little really goes a long way & we will thank you more than you can imagine!